Dinner with Anthony

Anthony LoFrisco stands in his kitchen with dishes he made with his mother’s recipes.

Anthony LoFrisco loves to cook and tell stories. So when he invites you to his house in Wilton for dinner, you are in for a deliciously long evening.

It was my good fortune recently to spend such a night with LoFrisco, a retired 83-year-old attorney who has written and published “The LoFrisco Family Cookbook.” It is equal parts memoir and family-style Italian cookbook, spiced with a dash of Sicilian humor.

LoFrisco greeted me with a glass of wine, a fine Brunello de Montalcino, that he says, “will get better as the night goes on.” He goes back to rolling dough that would eventually become our dessert, cream puffs, and tells me about his very first cooking lesson.

“It’s a very specific memory. I was 6 years old and spending the night at my aunt’s house. She was like a grandmother to me. Very warm and giving. The next morning, she asked me what I wanted. And I said, ‘Spaghetti.’ So she gets out the frying pan, the spaghetti leftovers and she teaches me how to fry spaghetti. It’s a dish I love to this day.”

His culinary education continued in his family’s kitchen in Dyker Heights, a Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood in the shadows of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where he watched his mother cook great family meals every day.

“My mother (Josie) came to this country from Sicily when she was just 6 years old. By the time she was 9, she was the live-in cook for a very successful Italian family in Albany (N.Y.). They were connoisseurs, so she learned to cook very well,” he says.

LoFrisco starts another story when his sous chef Christine politely suggests he had better start cooking if we were going to get through the feast he had planned. And that’s when I saw the printed list that was our sampling menu: Ricotta Cones, Caponatina, Pizza Rustica, Seafood Salad with bread, Meatballs and Sunday Sauce with Ricotta, Chicken Cacciatore, Cacio e Pepe, Cream Puffs and Cuchidada. LoFrisco returned to his labors, talking as he cooked. I continued with the wine and anticipated the meal to come.

“I wrote this book for my kids and family. They were after me for years to write down grandma’s recipes. But I was too busy with my law firm. But now I have more time, so I decided to do it,” the new author says. “All the recipes are simple. That was really the whole point. Good cooking is really all about the ingredients. The rest is easy.”

I then heard about St. Eleanor, LoFrisco’s affectionate name for his late wife, who devised a clever way to suss out the secrets of her mother-in-law’s recipes. “My mother never measured anything. So my wife would invite her over to cook. Eleanor would measure out all the ingredients and place them in separate bowls. My mother would grab what she needed. Then, after my mother was finished, Eleanor would measure the amount left in each bowl. That’s how she figured out the exact amount of everything my mother used,” LoFrisco says.

Eleanor achieved sainthood, according to LoFrisco, for “putting up with all my wild ideas.” LoFrisco had discovered an obscure French cookbook while browsing through the New York Public Library’s rare book collection, a frequent haunt during his high school days. The “fancy ingredients and different foods fascinated me,” he says. He eventually decided French cooking was too fussy, but not before he and Eleanor threw a Henry VIII feast. It seems the British royal who ruled the Empire for the first half of the 16th century, and his French counterpart, Francis I, competed to see which court could produce the most lavish meals.

“I cooked all this wonderful food. And we set up a big table. All of our friends dressed in period costume. And I insisted that there be no utensils, just like in Henry VIII’s day. Eleanor thought I was nuts, but she put up with it. That’s why she’s St. Eleanor,” LoFrisco says with a hearty laugh. And, as if on cue, Christine laid down several dishes in front of us, and we had a LoFrisco version of the Tudor feasts.

As we sampled the Pizza Rustica, Chicken Cacciatore, and other tasty Italian cuisine, LoFrisco kept repeating his mantra about keeping things simple. He cited the cream puffs as a perfect example.

Traditional crème puffs are filled with crème patissiere, which is a wonderful filling that requires precisely mixing sugar, flour, egg yolks, eggs, vanilla and milk. “It was a lot of work. One night I ran out of time, so I just made some whipped cream and My-T-Fine vanilla pudding. It was delicious. I never used crème patissiere again.”

LoFrisco’s book runs close to 300 pages, is beautifully designed and illustrated, and is printed on heavy paper stock. It is the kind of cookbook to be used while cooking; the pages look like spilled red sauce or a misplaced dollop of caponatina would wipe right off with no damage done. Like the recipes, the book is designed to last.

I would love to describe all the wonderful flavors I ate at chez Anthony, but LoFrisco does it so beautifully in his book that I will just refer you to his website, lofriscocookbook.com. The book’s subtitle is “How Josie Brought Sicily to Brooklyn,” and it’s how her son is sharing it with the rest of us.

Bob Horton is a columnist for the Greenwich Time and a regular contributor to Sunday Arts & Style.